Storytelling
by ElyahGray
Summary: A victim of hemorrhagic fever observes the surgeons, the head nurse, and another patient. All sorts of implications, but eventually HM, sorta.


Storytelling, part one of two (or maybe three)

Author: ElyahGray

Disclaimer: I do not own the characters or proprietary ideas of MASH, nor am I deriving any kind of profit from their use.

Rating: Oh, let's call it a T; it's not like the ratings system means much.

A/N: I always appreciate feedback, good and bad, even if you just want to call my prose pretentious and my devices hackneyed. And by "I always appreciate," I of course mean "Please don't make me beg for!"

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Everyone in this hospital is a liar, from the cold-eyed nurse staring at the ceiling in the bed next to me to the doctor prodding at me, and if they don't think it's obvious they're fools as well as liars.

This doctor is the worst of them. I can see his hypocrisy in the glitter of his wedding ring as he goes through the routine ablutions of healing the sick and doesn't look at the nurses, not a one, beyond the bounds of perfect professionalism.

"What did you do before the war?" the doctor asks, to distract me as he presses his fingers into the vulnerable spot in my wrist, where the blood beats close to the surface.

Guys ask me that all the time, and usually without the neutral tone this doctor has; it's natural – eight months on the line and three trips to aid haven't been enough take the cherub out of my cheeks or the ohgodwhat'midoinghere out of my eyes. Guys ask it with a chip on their shoulder, burly soon-to-be-career guys who've wanted to sign up for the Army ever since they got too big for their daddies to lay stripes on em and twenty-year sergeants who make faces like they're going to spit every time you say the word "college" in front of em. _What'd you do before this, Lieutenant Littleboy, Lieutenant Homesick Applepie? Nice job in a nice office for a pretty girl that'll make you a pretty wife if you see home again?_ That's what they mean when they ask what I did, and if they don't say it outright it's only because they don't have the words for it.

"I wrote children's stories," I say. That can make it worse, but the trick is not to put any emphasis on it; just say it and let it lie there. Most people will grunt and ignore it, on the off chance that you're making fun of them. This doctor makes a funny remark; well, not so funny, but he's trying. Then he wants to show me a picture of his damn kid – conscripts always want to remind you of what they've left behind, especially when they're betraying it over here – which leads to pictures of his wife, like I'm interested. He puts the photograph back in his wallet fast when the other doctor shows up with a whiff of snow about him. They mutter together; the second doctor makes the first laugh, and then they exchange a look that would have been poignant or perhaps shocking if it were anything new under the sun. I wonder if the first doctor takes his wedding ring off when he's cheating on his wife.

I suppose it's night now; it seems darker than it was before, and the second doctor just glances at the charts before taking a seat in the faint halo of light near the heater and scratching away at a letter. After a while he gets bored and starts pacing up and down the row of patents. The nurse in the bed next to me next to me has her eyes open, and doesn't know to look through her eyelashes so the light doesn't reflect off her eyes, or maybe she doesn't care whether he sees or not; the doctor notices and sits down next to her, on the far side from me.

"Listen, there's something bothering me, and I was hoping you could help." The doctor speaks quietly to her, I suppose assuming that everyone else in the ward is asleep. I can't see him except in silhouette from the light behind him, but her face is illuminated well enough to see in faint greyscale lamplight.

She lofts one eyebrow. "I'm a married woman, Hawkeye."

"Not that kind of problem, but it's not that I don't appreciate the way your mind works."

She folds her arms – awkwardly, because one is in a sling and mostly immobile – and smiles. It could be the light, but her smile is oddly disconnected; the same look I've seen at the front from guys who aren't the same as they were before. "Okay, then, what can I do for you?"

"You were in a jeep accident," the doctor says quietly. He glances around him, but nobody else in the ward is obviously stirring, including the nurse that's on duty. He pitches his voice low anyway.

"Yeah?" she asks, with a shrug of her uninjured shoulder.

"Then you walked to an aid station, they put you on an ambulance and sent you here."

"Well, you left out the heroic part where I dragged myself through a few snowy miles, but that's about it." I'm not imagining things; her joke falls flat because she isn't paying attention to how it will be received, because it doesn't matter to her what this doctor thinks.

"No, it isn't." Interesting that the doctor sees it too; I wouldn't have given him credit for being that perceptive.

The nurse – her name is Robbins; the head nurse, who twists her engagement ring around on her finger like it's burning her when she thinks nobody's looking at her, seems to know her – clenches her free hand on the sling holding her injured arm immobile, but her face doesn't move. "Oh?" she asked finally.

"You can't fool me," the doctor says, smugly enough that I don't have to know him before I hate him. "I'm a doctor. I know what a three-day-old bruise looks like, and I know when a bone's been setting for a couple of days before I set it myself." He's bluffing, just a little, but she hasn't slapped him; he must be asking the right questions. "You lied about how you got hurt, you snowed Colonel Potter so he call your CO. Come on, Robbins, I know you – you've been walking around here like somebody shot your puppy. What happened?"

Robbins opens her mouth, but no sound comes out. The doctor leans forward, but her chin trembles and she remains silent. She looks at the doctor, her eyes welling, begging him to understand without forcing her to say it out loud.

"NK?" he asks, as though he knows what it means.

She looks down, and water spills from both eyes. She doesn't have to nod.

"When the 8063 bugged out?"

"I took a wrong turn. We were in such a hurry to get out of the hot zone my CO didn't really assign us to jeeps so much as run screaming into the night; we sent too many corpsmen ahead and had too many nurses and jeeps at the end, so most of us ended up driving ourselves. It wasn't a convoy, it was chaos. It was pretty dark there and I guess I just…turned where I shouldn't have, or didn't turn where I should."

"You went north."

"As near as I can figure. Then I really was in a jeep accident – a mortar exploded not much farther away from my jeep than you are from me. I got friendlier with the road – I think that's when I broke my clavicle, I'm not sure – and when I woke up, I had some companionship."

"What happened then?"

"Oh, well, the squad and I spent the next four days playing gin rummy and singing Wagner," she said. She tries again to sound flip – really tries this time, but her voice cracks and, in spite of what I can see as her best efforts, she's crying again.

The doctor – Hawkeye, I suppose – does himself credit by not saying anything, but putting a hand on her uninjured shoulder. After a few moments of silent, shuddering sobs, she sniffs and pulls herself together with visible effort. She shivers, just a little, but he takes his hand away.

"It's, uh, time, you know, gets a little funny. I didn't quite know…I'm not exactly sure what happened, but a number of them – the, the North Koreans, I mean – got shot, and while the rest were busy attending to that I found my clo…um, my boots and started walking south as nearly as I could reckon. Eventually I found a stream, the stream took me to battalion aid, battalion aid sent me here…" She swallows tears thickly. "Please, please, Hawkeye, keep it to yourself."

"But…a thing like that, they'll discharge you. You'll get to go home! Your husband is waiting for you."

"You don't understand," says Robbins miserably.

"What? What don't I understand?"

"If you saw through me, if you knew…about the NKs, and you don't even _know_ me, my husband will see it in a minute. And he'll…" She looks away from Hawkeye and fixes her gaze in the middle distance. She doesn't see the impact her remark has, but the doctor turns his face towards the light and there's a wound there. That's his lie, I could see it a mile away: He thinks the things that happen here don't count, that when he goes home he'll find that nothing's changed. So it bothers him, more than he'll admit, to understand that this Robbins won't be the same when she gets home. By the time she's listening again, the wound is smoothed over.

"Oh, Helen, don't say it. Don't even think it! I'm sure, I'm _sure_ he wouldn't do anything like that."

She shrugs one-shouldered again, still not looking at the doctor. "Maybe that's, maybe you're right. Even so, do you think he'd be able to forgive me for coming over here? Do you think he'd ever look at me and see me as he saw me before?"

Now Hawkeye looks away from her eyes. He can't have an answer, but to his credit he doesn't offer any pablum.

"Please," she says. "Just fix it so I can't travel for a couple of weeks. Not long, just a couple of weeks. I need…" she pauses, forming her words with care. "Time to get my story straight."

"Yeah," Hawkeye says. "All right. I can keep you here two weeks, on the condition that you talk to Sidney Freedman when he's down here for…" The doctor doesn't end his sentence, but I can feel his eyes flick over to me as though they were tangible.

It's obvious from the way she tightens her lips that she doesn't like the conditionality, but he didn't leave her much of a choice. "All right."

He extends a hand to her, but she looks away. "Don't, Hawk," she says with a thousand-yard stare.

"Get some rest," he says, standing up. It obviously bothers him that there're some wounds he can hardly perceive, let alone repair, but he doesn't say anything further. He goes through another meaningless cycle of rounds. Neither he nor I sleep until there's sunlight out.

---

The first doctor keeps asking, and I keep not answering. Here; I'll tell you: The godshonest truth is that I don't think I'll be writing any more children's stories when I get home.

I always thought there was no power on earth that could get me to stop telling stories in the privacy of my own head, until Jeong Jie got shot up telling the story of the man who rescued a tiger from a trap. It was just my second week out, and back then I thought I'd write a book of Korean children's stories when I got home, so I let Jeong Jie go on about the stories his grandmother told him. He was just getting to the part where the clever rabbit tricks the tiger into jumping back in the hole in the ground, waving his arms around with the fire of the tale like a damn idiot, when the guerrillas started shooting at him from out of the trees. That wasn't so bad, 'cause nobody much liked Jeong Jie; most guys figured he was an NK spy or some other kind of rat, or else why would he've been trying so hard to make us like him. But if he was NK, those other NK didn't show him any mercy, they just kept shooting at him, even after the rest of us had got our weapons and were shooting back. That was my first trip to aid, and the easiest, because I wasn't hurt; I only went in the ambulance with the wounded because the smell of Jeong Jie was making me feel sick and I didn't want to puke in front of the sergeant who still doesn't like me.

So I didn't mourn for him, particularly, but it's not like I didn't feel anything when he died. Certainly I wasn't going to make the mistake of paying attention to stories instead of the dangerous things.

_So_, I said. _I am the wind. I am the most amazing soldier ever. Nothing in the world can stop me; no power can challenge and nothing would dare to wound – _

But you see where this is going, even before I get there: Telling myself that I'm paying attention, intense, laser-like attention, isn't the same as actually paying it. That was the second time I got sent to aid; I was so busy being the wind that I didn't pay attention when one of my boys, a buck private that just got in from Muscogee or some other gawdawful place, started wandering a little out of line. I was the wind and he wandered so far out of the line that he stepped right on a landmine. He died, and the kid just behind him caught half a pound of shrapnel in his torso, so he died in a hospital. I got enough in my arm and stomach that they sent me to get some surgery, but I healed up fast enough and it was back to the line a third time.

And that time nobody died because I was telling stories instead of paying attention, because I was paying attention. No officer – no _father_ – has ever been more attentive. They still died, though, three or four, of dysentery or some other disease that causes men to cramp and dribble out their life, and nothing could keep their wrenching, putrid deaths out of my mind. And soon enough I was fevered and hoping to die, so back to the ambulance, back to aid, back to a MASH, though they had little enough help for a case like mine.

That's why I don't tell stories anymore. They're buried in the same place I put all the secret shames of childhood and the realization of death and the suddenly sober bilious realization that the whore we bought was just a little girl, this whole time, only a couple of years past the love colorful books with happy endings. They're buried beneath the smell of men who've died of dysentery.

Even if I could retrieve them, all the stories would end up back on the line, anyway, back where I'm going to die this time, sure as sunrise.

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But the doctors say I can't go back to the line, that it's not dysentery but some kind of horrible, uniquely Korean disease that's been killing American soldiers two years now and they don't know what causes it. They don't even want to move me; they think I'm going to die any minute now and that they don't want to hasten it.

I'm not going to die here, where it's clean and polite and people call me by my name, and not "sir" or "lieutenant" or "hey, you." It's for me to die on the line, because there can be no life after Korea. This hospital is merely purgatory; like a medieval leper, I'm in purgatory before death.

I don't die after a day. I don't die after four. On the fifth, the first doctor – BJ, I learn, BJloveshiswife, the nurses say it like it's one word – concludes that I'm not going to die at all, and I can even have some water, and walk around a bit, if I want to. He keeps up the constant prattle, and I answer his questions for the lack of anything else to do. He tells me he'll buy my book, the new one with the wicked queen and her noble peasant daughter, for his daughter, once she's reading. I go back and forth on whether I believe him. I think he just keeps talking because he doesn't like looking at my eyes; he knows that I can see through him.

I can see through him. I can see through his partner-in-crimes, too: Hawkeye, Captain Pierce. I don't know how the two of em haven't been discovered before, by someone who would put a stop to it, as they've nothing like discretion. Maybe everyone in this monument to hypocrisy turns a blind eye to them so they don't have to see their own falsehoods writ large.

Hawkeye thinks that Korea is a world all to itself, that actions in Korea don't carry over to the real world at home. Hawkeye, Thatwouldbecasanovahawkeye still looks at nurses, because even fraternal fidelity means nothing; the slate will be wiped clean. Hawkeye still takes them into the supply tent, when he can convince them with honeyed words.

BJ knows better about the dichotomy between here and there. BJ takes off his wedding ring to keep it clear of taint. It's lucky that they're both busy so much, BJ in trying to convince me to talk to his pet psychologist, a man with nothing behind his eyes, and Hawkeye in trying to contrive a happy ending for his silent screaming nurse, or they might accidentally realize their difference in philosophy, the difference the pet and I and maybe even inward-turned Robbins can hear whistling like a mortar from ten miles away.

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Feedback makes for authors who feel better about writing the next chapter instead of their Govt-540 paper.


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